Anthropic’s showdown with The US Department of War may literally be life or death for all of us.

On January 27, 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its doomsday clock to 85 seconds to midnight:

Without going into their arguments in detail, I think it is fairer to say that we are significantly close to the brink four weeks later. I don’t write this happily.

But the juxtaposition of a two things over the last few days has scared the shit out of me.

Item 1: The Trump administration seems hellbent on using AI absolutely everywhere, and seems to be prepared to hold Anthropic (and presumably ultimately other companies) at gunpoint to allow them to use that AI however they damn please, including for mass surveillance and to guide autonomous weapons.

Item 2: These systems cannot be trusted. I have been trying to tell the world that since 2018, in every way I know how, but people who don’t really understand the technology keep blundering forward, ignoring the trust issues that are inherent. Already GenAI appears to have been used in the Maduro raids and to write tariff regulations. And thousands of other places.